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Black Lung Clinics, Radioactive Meat and Clouds of Pesticide

When Gina McCarthy, the head of the Environmental Protection Agency, rolled out new rules on carbon emissions this week, she extolled agency’s role in fighting for the environment and public health since its inception in 1970. Despite critics “crying wolf” about supposedly job-killing regulations, McCarthy said, the agency pushed ahead anyway to regulate automobile emissions and acid rain. “Time after time, we followed the science, protected the American people,” she said. “Now, climate change is calling our number.” But the agency’s early causes looked a lot different than the global issue of climate change we see today.

While still in its infancy, the EPA commissioned a group of photographers to document what environmental crisis and the environmental movement looked like in the 1970s for the Documerica Project, which ran until 1977. The photos, released online in 2010, are not of melting glaciers in the Arctic or island nations swamped by rising sea levels. They are much closer to home: Coal mining communities in West Virginia, crop dusters spewing pesticides and open dumps in New York. This is how the EPA imagined its mission four decades ago.